AMD Prepares New Range of Low Power APUs for Tablet Use - Report

AMD prepares new T-series APUs for tablet use

AMD's first generation of Fusion accelerated processing units (APUs) have managed to make their way into quite an important number of netbooks and other mobile computing devices, and recent reports suggest that the company is now working on developing a new series of Fusion CPUs designed especially for tablets.

These will be released in the so-called T-series and feature the same architecture as the company's current C and E APUs with a few modifications to allow for a lower power consumption.

As a result of these tweaks, the TDP of the APUs should fall somewhere around the 5W mark, which is still about 2W higher than that of Intel's recently released Atom Oak Trail CPUs.

AMD's processor should, however, provide better performance in most applications as well as more advanced graphics capabilities.

While AMD hasn't made official any information regarding the T-series APUs, the company has already showcased, at the beginning of the year, a 5W version of its C-50 processor.

The APU demoed back then worked at the same frequency as its 9W counterpart and packed two processing cores as well as the Radeon HD 6250 GPU that comes standard with the Ontario APUs.

To achieve this feat, the company analyzed the hardware requirements of tablets and other low power computing devices and decided to use a simpler memory controller, that supported a limited number of frequencies and terminations, as well as fewer peripheral ports (such as USB), and video outputs.

The next major breakthrough in energy efficiency for AMD will come once the company moves to the 28nm production node with the Wichita and Krishna APUs.

According to some previous report, these have been already taped out by the company and the first batches of these chips are expected to ship to OEMs starting in the fourth quarter of 2011. (via SemiAccurate)